TTMT: 30 January 2018

I haven’t got anything finished to show you, so here’s some video of me showing the quilting on my Plume quilt and wibbling about how to finish the last border. The last half of the video is me actually quilting the centre part of the quilt, so though it’s a fairly long video (~11 minutes), you really can skip the last five minutes without missing a whole lot.

12 thoughts on “TTMT: 30 January 2018”

I like watching people quilt too.. except for the noise, there is something kind of soothing about it. Though I suppose if I had any idea how, I could have layered music over top and taken out the sewing noises (and occasional breathing noise – another flaw with having the camera kind of at chin height) haha..

I’ve learned them from a few different classes on Craftsy, but this is really the first time it’s kind of .. worked. I’m not sure it was this specific class (Ultimate Free-motion Feathers), exactly, but I think it helped doing all the Plumify stitching first… it’s a lot of the same motions, but less of the pressure of trying to get a feather right.

I’m going to need to do some searching to find Colour Catchers… they don’t actually sell them in Canada anymore. (They did briefly, but pulled out of the market several years ago.) Some fabric stores sell them and there’s an alternate product I’ve found at one random drug store and I usually use that, but just happen to have finished my most recent box when I washed the log cabin quilt. I think I might wash this a couple times thoug, with A LOT of colour catchers in the wash each time. I also have a box of Dylon Colour Run Remover, which I’ve used in the past when reds have run and it worked great. So I think that’ll go in one load as well.

I loved watching you quilt , it was nice to see someone real quilting , I love the craftsy courses on free motion I just get freaked out by how noisy my machine seems to be with it. I might have to record it on my next video so you can all hear it and tell me if it sounds wrong. Love the gloves to , mine came last week but I haven’t been brave enough to try them or cut them yet. xx

It could be the FMQ foot you’re using. This one that came with my machine doesn’t hop and so it’s pretty quiet.. you just hear the sound of the motor and of the needle going up/down, but my other FMQ feet are hopping ones and they are SO noisy. It makes me think something is wrong with my machine. Which there is not. If that’s the problem you’re having, there is a way to stop them from hopping – Leah Day from Day Style Designs has a way to sort of… jail break your FMQ feet to make them work better.

I use the side of my hands a lot for moving around the quilt sandwich, so it hasn’t bothered me cutting off the fingers and I love having the ability to thread needles and so on. A lot of people really use their finger tips though for moving the sandwich, which for them would probably make cutting off the finger tips a bad idea. I think you just have to decide what works best for you.

For the big feathers it really helped to draw them out, but except for drawing some out on paper I didn’t find I needed to trace the smaller feathers onto my fabric for the quilting. It helped to have a constrained area that I had to fill but it flowed remarkably smoothly.

This foot that I was using while filming is the quietest FMQ foot I’ve got… all my others hop, which I don’t like for many reasons, including that they are SO SO SO loud. This one doesn’t move around too much though so it keeps things much quieter.

I don’t know how to do too much editing with videos.. I can trim things out and add in some things, but I’ve never experimented with the sound part of things!

Quilting with the camera in my lap was NOT easy! I had to look around the side of the camera to see what I was doing because the camera was right in my line of sight and then it was trying to keep it stable and out of the way of the excess quilt fabric… it was kind of funny. Made me wish I had a camera that strapped onto my head like a lamp 😀

My stitches aren’t too even either, although I’m getting much better at it! I usually try not to care too much about the evenness of my stitches, so long as none of my stitches are longer than a quarter inch. And even when they are I usually kind of cheat and tack down the stitches instead of picking them out and quilting it again.

Anyway, thank you! It’s all a work in progress, but I’ve kind of decided I need to stop being afraid of messing things up because all my quilts aren’t doing me any good as tops stuffed away in a closet 😀

Your quilting is so beautiful! Your feathers look great. Mine come out looking like weird tongues. I was going to suggest pebbles for the small spaces, right before you said it yourself. But what about sort of a minifeather there? Or a swirl of some sort. Another option would be sort of just echoing the quilting you’ve already got nearby until the space is more filled.

Thank you! It’s taken a lot of time to figure them out (and they’re still kind of hit and miss). I’ve taken a few online classes that had different ways of doing them and I think this last one finally worked for me. I have a tendency to stitch the feather plume from the top (so swinging up from the base of the feather and then down and around), but it seems to work so much better if you stitch the plume from the bottom up (so starting at the base of the feather, stitching the bottom half of the plume and swinging up and over to make the top). I get much better control of the size and shape that way… kind of stops them from coming out too long and too flat.

I thought about just echoing to fill the whole thing, but wound up doing straight lines every half inch. It’s slow going (I’m still not done – I left it all alone for a day), but I like how it’s looking.